Stefanie Pötzsch

Privacy Awareness: A Means to Solve the Privacy Paradox?

People are limited in their resources, i.e. they have limited memory capabilities, cannot pay attention to too many things at the same time, and forget much information after a while; computers do not suffer from these limitations. Thus, revealing personal data in electronic communication environments and being completely unaware of the impact of privacy might cause a lot of privacy issues later. Even if people are privacy aware in general, the so-called privacy paradox shows that they do not behave according to their stated attitudes. This paper discusses explanations for the existing dichotomy between the intentions of people towards disclosure of personal data and their behaviour. We present requirements on tools for privacy-awareness support in order to counteract the privacy paradox.

The role of soft information in trust building: evidence from online social lending

We analyze empirical data of Germanys largest online social lending platform Smava.de to exemplarily study the contribution of unstructured, ambiguous, or unverified information to trust building in online communities. After controlling for the influence of hard information, we find that textual statements that appeal to social behavior actually affect trust building. However, the evidence is less clear for voluntarily disclosed personal data. Lenders generally seem to give more weight to hard information so that disclosing personal data promises little benefit while potentially exposing borrowers to privacy risks.

Collective exposure: peer effects in voluntary disclosure of personal data

This paper reports empirical evidence for peer effects in privacy behavior using field data from online social lending. Our content analysis and regression models show that individuals copy observable behavior of others in decisions on a) how much to write about oneself, b) whether to share custom pictures, c) what personal data to disclose, and d) how identifiable to present oneself. We frame this finding in the theory of descriptive social norms and analyze moderating effects, such as similarity of context, social proximity, and mimicry of success factors. The presence of peer effects in disclosure behavior can explain the formation and change of apparent social norms and attitudes towards privacy.

Privacy in Social Software

While using social software and interacting with others on the Internet, users share a lot of information about themselves. An important issue for these users is maintaining control over their own personal data and being aware to whom which data is disclosed. In this chapter, we present specific requirements and realised solutions to these problems for two different kinds of social software: social network sites and web forums.

Requirements for identity management from the perspective of multilateral interactions

In this chapter, application scenarios for identity management systems will be discussed in order to identify requirements which should be or already are considered in the design and implementation of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs).

Privacy-Respecting Access Control in Collaborative Workspaces

In these days’ information society, people share their life with others not only in their direct, personal environment, but also on the Internet by using social software such as collaborative workspaces. In this context, an important issue is maintaining control over personal data, i.e., who is able to access which information. In this paper, we argue why traditional access control mechanisms are inappropriate for collaborative workspaces in general and present a concept for privacy-respecting access control in a web forum as an instance of collaborative workspaces.

Open Source Contributions

Privacy protection tools can be characterised by the number of parties that have to cooperate so that the tools work and achieve the desired effect [Pfi01]: Some privacy protection tools can be used stand-alone, without the need for the cooperation of other parties. Others require that the communication partners use the same tools. Some tools only function when being supported by an appropriate infrastructure that quite often is currently not in place.

Privacy-Respecting Reputation for Wiki Users

Wikis are popular tools for creation and sharing of content. Integrated reputation systems allow to assess expertise and reliability of authors and thus to support trust in the wiki content. Yet, results from our empirical study indicate that the disclosure of user reputation evokes privacy issues. As a solution for this conflict between the need to evaluate trustworthiness of users and protecting their privacy, we present a privacy-respecting reputation system for wikis that we realized as OpenSource-Extension for the wiki software MediaWiki.

Trustworthiness of Online Content

Some decades ago content on which people base important judgment used to be provided by relatively few, institutional sources like Encyclopedias. Since the 1990s the Internet has become an invaluable source of information for a growing number of people. While ten years ago web content has also only been provided by a limited number of institutions or individuals, today’s Web 2.0 technologies have enabled nearly every web user to act not only as consumer, but also as producer of content. User contribution is at the core of many services available on the Web and as such, is deeply built into those service architectures. Examples are wikis like Wikipedia, that are entirely based on content contributed by multiple users and modifiable at any time by any of them.